Students cross 5th Street as the school day begins, March 22, at Spurgeon Intermediate. The school is under the control of the Santa Ana Unified School District. REGISTER FILE PHOTO

Several school districts in California, including Santa Ana Unified, will be receiving a windfall of new state and federal funding that comes with a lot fewer strings attached.

In recent months, Gov. Jerry Brown and President Obama's Education Department have both managed to reduce their respective rules governing how education money is allocated to, and spent by, school districts.

Gov. Brown's Local Control Funding Formula gives school districts a simpler, more-transparent funding formula on a per-pupil basis with additional money for more disadvantaged students. Santa Ana Unified, for example, with 78 percent of its roughly 56,000 students considered low-income and 53 percent of them English learners, will get $1,500 per student more than it currently does when LCFF is fully implemented.

By getting rid of a maze of school funding categories and requirements, LCFF allows school districts to choose how to spend money in ways that best meet the needs of their specific students. In exchange for this freedom, school districts must create accountability plans to demonstrably improve student performance.

In addition, this month the Obama administration granted Santa Ana Unified and seven other California school districts more flexibility and autonomy to spend federal education funding. These districts got regulatory relief from all accountability sanctions under the No Child Left Behind Act in exchange for a promise to create accountability systems that improve student outcomes and the development of systems that incorporate measures of student progress, including test scores, into teachers' evaluations.

The Obama administration negotiated this federal waiver from NCLB directly with districts like Santa Ana because California refused to include test scores in its teacher evaluation formula.

“We're not taking this on because it's simple,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said. “We're taking it on because it's the right thing to do for more than a million students.”

The million-dollar questions moving forward will be: Can this huge new influx of money actually lead to improved student achievement? And will districts evaluate teacher quality based, at least partially, on how well students actually perform?

Recent events in the Los Angeles Unified School District demonstrate how difficult education reform can be. LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy had a plan to allow funding to follow students to their schools and to let principals decide how best to spend that money. But the school board overrode Deasy's plan. Instead, the board passed a resolution calling for $1 billion in new state funding so that LAUSD can restore the number of school district employees to prerecession levels – even though enrollment has been declining.

Superintendent Deasy mocked the plan, calling it a “directive to hire every human being on the West Coast.”

Deasy can take solace in the fact that at least 20 school districts around the nation have embraced a Deasy-like school-level decentralization plan that allows money to follow the students to schools in exchange for more school-level accountability.

In fact, the Oakland and San Francisco districts have made significant improvements in their test scores since moving to student-based funding systems. And school districts like Santa Ana Unified now have a chance to follow their lead.

Santa Ana got the federal waiver because it was willing to buck the status quo and include test scores in teachers' evaluations. Teachers unions are furious with the Obama administration for using test scores to assess teachers. And many in the education establishment also fought Gov. Brown's Local Control Funding Formula.

Now, school districts like Santa Ana, which have funding flexibility from the state and federal government, need to focus on students and results. If they follow LAUSD's wrong path and focus on catering to unions and hiring larger staffs, they won't reach their goals. Santa Ana needs to give school principals the flexibility and independence to decide how to spend money at the school level. Principals are in the best position to know how to meet the needs of their students, and district officials need to make sure money follows students all the way to the classroom.

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